March 2025

It doesn’t take a rocket science to realize that we are all different people. I don’t particularly mean all around the world, even if that is a fact as well. You can have 4 people in your family and sooner or later you are going to see huge variances in their behavior and thinking, even though they maybe were all reared with a common set of beliefs and customs. I have 3 children, and a casual observer would probably have trouble relating them if they were in a room full of people. That, in itself, is not all bad. If we were all the same, it would probably be a dull world. My God, if you were all like me, we would all just be sitting around reading books, mostly about history. Ugh, how horrible! We couldn’t have that, now could we? But we all share a small blue planet that is hurtling through space at 1.3 million mph while at the equator is spinning at almost 1700 KM/H. Hold onto your hats! The point is, we are crowded and things change the more of us that come streaming to earth at birth, trailing trails of stardust. And the more of us that appear, and the more crowded we get, the more complicated it gets. I, as many of you know, am a Viet Nam vet. And I was so very early in Viet Nam that I didn’t have time to ingest the history of the place before I got there. Then, a few months later left to come home. So now that I am retired (meaning I work when I want to work, or when Kerry tells me to do something). I research things I don’t know and one of those things is what was happening in the world when I went to Viet Nam, and the politics that was in place. Recently I have come across a couple of books about Kennedy. I voted for JFK, in 1960, my first time to vote. Then in late ‘61, I got to see him at Lackland AFB, he was no more than 10 feet away. He was my CIC when I was in the military. And I have just found out that 2 weeks before he was killed on Nov22nd 1963, he had written an order that 1,000 troops were to be pulled from VN by the end of that year, and all were to be pulled by the end of 1965. He did not want to be in Viet Nam. Think of how much different the world might be, were he not killed and the 58,000+ did not die after him. His biggest fight was with his generals and the CIA. They wanted to nuke Russia, he didn’t. That difference in opinion had broad ramifications. At present, we have an aggression in some ways like those in VN in the early ‘60’s. The major belief was that if we didn’t stop Communism in SE Asia, that it would come at us from the west and would reach our shores. Turns out that wasn’t the case, it never was. But we are presently facing a military aggression that has much more dangerous. It is not a war waged out of need of resources. It is not a war that will stop an aggressor, indeed it is a war by an aggressor, just to please his ego, and he is bankrupting his country in the process. The dead on his side is in the hundreds of thousands, so he draws resources from another dictator who gets his people killed too, for no apparent gain other than to show how tough he is. Yes, we have different opinions. Yes, we have different priorities. Yes, we like different things. But we must be careful of those who want to carve our solid bedrock of our country up and grind it into sand. Sand that will not support our population, nor house our people. It will not feed us. All it will do is make a pleasant beach for the rich to go sit by the ocean. We have watched a brave nation, Ukraine, resist this dangerous tyrant, one who has always been our enemy, not because its people are that different that our people. There are good people in Russia, just like us. But those people are not in power to control their government. We are still able to do that, at least somewhat. Let us not give up that right. We are, and have been for 250 years, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Let us stand so, united in that forever.